Putting Donald Trump’s Promises Under Scrutiny

Donald J. Trump is emerging as the likely Republican presidential nominee.CreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

By Albert R. Hunt | Bloomberg View

Feb. 28, 2016

A powerful force driving Donald J. Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders in the presidential race is the frustration of grass-roots voters that politicians in Washington haven’t kept their promises.

Democrats, though still high on President Obama, are upset about an economic recovery that benefited Wall Street more than Main Street, top executives more than workers.

The anger is more palpable among Republican voters, who ushered in big congressional majorities for the party, expecting to end Mr. Obama’s health care law, reduce the size of government, cut taxes and bolster national security. None of it happened.

With that track record of broken promises and with Mr. Trump emerging as the likely Republican presidential nominee, it’s good to look at his prominent promises and the critiques:

National security: Mr. Trump has pledged to be tough, to defeat the Islamic State by bombing oil fields, which he would then turn over to American companies. He would force Arabs to do the fighting against the Islamic State. He says he will “get along very well” with the Russian strongman Vladimir V. Putin, whom Mr. Trump has praised as a strong leader. He gets his foreign policy advice from watching television news programs, he says.

This doesn’t impress many foreign policy experts. “He has said very little of substance,” said former Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “It appears he doesn’t have a real grasp of the range of complex issues or hasn’t done his homework.”

Leon E. Panetta, who served as defense secretary and director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Obama administration, said, “It’s the sort of stuff you expect to hear at the bar at the country club.”

Mass deportations: Mr. Trump proposes removing from the United States 11 million undocumented immigrants within two years. He poses the challenge in simple terms: “They say you have to go through a huge legal process. You don’t. They are illegal.”

The American Action Forum, a right-of-center research organization run by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a prominent Republican economist, will soon release a study on the economic impact of Mr. Trump’s plan: The number of personnel devoted to apprehensions would soar to 90,582 from 4,844; the number of attorneys and courts would increase twentyfold; the number of detention beds would increase tenfold; and almost 100,000 chartered buses and flights would be required. American Action estimates that the cost to the economy would be $1 trillion.

The Pew Research Center, which is nonpartisan, calculates that the deportations would cause big job losses in sectors of the economy: 26 percent of farming, fishing and forestry workers; 17 percent of building maintenance and cleaning personnel; and 14 percent of construction workers. Studies showed that many of these jobs would go unfilled, devastating the economy, says the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

The border wall: Mr. Trump vows to build a wall along the border with Mexico that would be paid for by Mexico.

Experts ridicule that possibility. “The Mexicans treat this with total disdain,” said Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, a libertarian organization. “I don’t know any policy people that take this seriously.”

Trade: Mr. Trump would impose tariffs on some goods from Mexico and huge penalties on imports from China, from 25 percent to 45 percent. These countries are cheating America on trade, he charges.

But trade specialists note that he couldn’t do this unilaterally.

“No president in our lifetime has ever contemplated anything like this, but I believe Congress would have to act,” said Susan Schwab, who was the United States trade representative under President George W. Bush. “These would be in violation of international trade rules, and retaliation would be taken against American goods.’’

To date, Mr. Trump has been immune from substantive criticism, and he may have answers to these complaints, though he has been questioned passively. His Republican rivals have begun to grill him on issues such as health care; that could be just the start.